


Yregrof

by lirin



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, White Collar
Genre: Alternate Universe - Harry Potter Fusion, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Gen, mentions of Neal/Sara
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-13
Updated: 2017-10-13
Packaged: 2019-01-08 11:20:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,826
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12253341
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lirin/pseuds/lirin
Summary: Neal's never forged anything quite like this.





	Yregrof

**Author's Note:**

  * For [isquinnabel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/isquinnabel/gifts).



Elizabeth was sitting on a picnic blanket, surrounded by dishes and silverware. Neal thought he could almost smell the meatballs from across the park. He hurried to follow Peter, who was striding across the grass.

Elizabeth tucked something under the corner of the picnic basket as they approached, and picked up a plate. “We have two kinds of garlic bread,” she said, handing the plate to Neal. “This one is on ciabatta, and the other is baguette.”

Neal took a bite and thanked her with the usual pleasantries, but out of the corner of his eye he tried to get a better look at what she had hidden. It was one of the cloth napkins—identical to the one Peter was now spreading in his lap—but there was some sort of stick wrapped in it at very least. There must be something else in there too. The napkin was big enough to hide much more, and why would Elizabeth want to hide a simple stick?

“This was a nice surprise, hon,” Peter said. “When did you decide you were going to treat us to lunch?”

“Just a few hours ago,” Elizabeth said. “I—” She broke off with a sigh. Staring down at her lap, she twirled her fork absently through her spaghetti without taking a bite. “Actually,” she said finally, “I had a visit from an old friend this morning. Some friends of his found something where it shouldn’t have been, and they’re worried they’re going to be framed for something having to do with the object. So I told him I’d ask the two of you for advice.”

Neal smiled. “I can’t think of a nicer way to give advice than over lunch, so thank you. Would you mind passing the antipasto salad?”

“Which old friend was this?” Peter asked. He looked worried.

“Bill. You remember Bill, don’t you?”

“Oh, yes, of course.” Peter’s shoulders lowered as if to relax, but Neal thought he still seemed tense. “Bill is an old friend of El’s,” Peter explained. “He’s from England. He was working near here in 1999 and came to our wedding, but I don’t think he’s been to our side of the Atlantic since.”

“How old of a friend?” Neal asked.

“Oh, well,” Elizabeth chuckled. “I met him when I was just out of college. We had a bit of a flirtation, actually. He was here studying abroad—on work study, I mean, and we dated for a summer. It was just a bit of fun, though. I showed him the city, he told me about his work in that delicious British accent, and at the end of the summer we went our separate ways.”

“Except now he’s back,” Neal said.

“Oh, don’t worry, he’s married now. He’s just here to ask for help.” She set aside her untouched spaghetti plate and took a drink of water. She sighed. “So, there’s this—this mirror. Which was presumably stolen, because it turned up in Bill’s brother and sister-in-law’s basement. They don’t know who put it there or why, but their best guess is that they’re about to be framed for something.”

“Have they contacted the authorities?” Peter asked.

“They didn’t want to risk it. Things are—still politically fraught.”

“Is the mirror still in their basement?” Neal asked. “They need to get it out of there.”

“They did,” Elizabeth said. “They moved it to Bill’s cottage, actually. As you can imagine, he’s less than thrilled about that, because that makes him and his family targets of the unknown adversaries who otherwise might have overlooked them.”

“So they need to get it out of there, as well,” Peter said.

“That’s one option,” Elizabeth said. “The other is to—spike their opponents’ guns, as it were.”

“Come up with a legitimate reason for them to be in possession of the mirror,” Neal said.

“Exactly!”

“And that’s where you want our advice?” Peter asked.

“I know of nobody better to ask.”

Neal took a contemplative bite of garlic bread. “How big is the mirror? Is it unique, or mass-produced?”

“Full-length, in fact quite a bit taller than a person, and heavy. It’s very unique. Actually, it’s sort of an art piece. When people look in it, they don’t just see their reflection. They see—other things, too.”

“Other things?”

“I’d rather not say unless you need me to. The less you know about the mirror, the better.”

“So the mirror is completely unique,” Neal said. “That’s how our unknown framers will be able to establish that your friend’s friends have the mirror, because there’s nothing else like it, right?”

“Well, yes.”

“So what if someone makes a copy?”

“You mean a forgery,” Peter put in.

“Yes, a forgery. If a forgery of the mirror exists, then any evidence they might have—faked photos, suborned witnesses—is worthless because they can just say they had the forgery with them. They just felt like making a copy of it, out of sentimentality or something.”

“That could work,” Peter said. “The only question is, can the mirror be forged?” He seemed to be directing the question to Elizabeth, which seemed unfair because she was definitely not the resident expert on forgery here.

“Anything can be forged with access to the original and sufficient time and materials,” Neal said. “The only question is, do we have enough time before the trap is sprung.”

Peter was still waiting for Elizabeth’s answer.

Elizabeth’s hand clutched at the napkin under the basket, crumpling it slowly. “It might be possible,” she said finally. “It’s worth a try, at least.” She turned to Neal. “Are you offering?”

“I’ve never forged a mirror before,” Neal said. “Sounds like fun!”

* * *

Neal stopped briefly on his way to the Burkes’, to get some reference books and art supplies from his apartment and to phone Mozzie. Even so, it was still scarcely 1:00 by the time he met back up with them.

Elizabeth’s friend—“William Weasley. Call me Bill.”—was sitting at the dining table with his back to the fireplace, reading a book and fiddling with a stick. “I work for an English bank,” he told Neal. “Mostly I travel the world, reclaiming property for them.”

“Sounds like my girlfriend’s job,” Neal said. “Insurance investigator?”

“Something like that,” Bill said. “It can be dangerous.” He gestured casually at some old scars on his face.

“Yeah, Sara’s been lucky,” Neal said. “It’s the sort of job that takes both brains and luck in equal supply. I hope your luck’s improved since you got those?”

“Well, I married the most wonderful woman and we now have three children, so I consider myself pretty lucky. And the—political climate has improved since then.”

“You’re in politics?”

“No, but...well, small towns, you know. When everybody knows everybody, politics affects everything, you know?”

Neal shrugged. “Yeah, sure.” He sat down at the table, spreading out his sketchbook, pencils, and paints. The heavier supplies he had left by the door. “So, do we have photos of this mirror? I assume the original is still at your home in England.”

“It is,” Bill said, “but I have something better than photos.” He raised the stick that he was still holding.

Elizabeth gasped and grabbed his arm. “That’s illegal!”

“So is stealing the Mirror of Erised,” Bill said. “There’s a limit to how many secrets we can keep and still be successful. Besides, I’ll take care of it when we’re finished.”

Elizabeth glanced nervously at Neal, then back to Bill. “If you must, then.”

“Don’t I get a say in whether we’re doing something illegal?” Neal asked. “If I’m even merely present when illegal acts are occurring, it won’t look good at my next hearing.”

“You’ve got nothing to worry about, Mr. Caffrey,” Bill said. “Nothing we’re doing is illegal in Muggle laws. We’re the only ones who need to worry.”

Before Neal could dispute this assessment or ask what Muggle laws were—he’d never heard of them and he’d spent enough time on the wrong side of the law to learn quite a bit about it—Bill waved the stick, and a glowing image of a mirror appeared on the table.

“Is that a holographic projector?” Neal asked, and then remembered the ‘illegal’ part. “Did you _steal_ a holographic projector? Peter, did you know about this?”

Peter took his time sitting down at the table. “I knew about it,” he said finally. “But it’s not a holographic projector.”

“It’s some sort of projector, though. Unless...this all started with a mirror, so maybe you’re doing something fancy with mirrors?” He pushed back in his chair to look around the room, but didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. “Of course Mozzie would probably have some conspiracy theory, that it’s actually alien technology from Area 51 that you’re not supposed to acknowledge owning, and that’s why it’s illegal, because nobody can know that aliens exist.”

“Mozzie would be more right than he knew,” Peter said solemnly. Neal had never heard Peter take Mozzie’s theories seriously before.

“Except it’s not aliens whose existence is being kept secret,” Elizabeth put in. “It’s witches and wizards, and the existence of magic.”

Neal ran a hand through his hair in frustration. He hadn’t thought Peter and Elizabeth would stoop to something as low as this. “This is just an elaborate joke, isn’t it?” he said. “The mirror you asked me to forge doesn’t even exist.” He waved his hand through the hologram. It couldn’t be felt, but the lines stayed where they were in the air instead of being projected onto his fingers. Weird.

“I know it sounds ridiculous, but magic is real,” Elizabeth said. “Watch!” She reached inside the picnic basket, which was sitting on the kitchen counter, and untangled her stick from the cloth napkin she had wrapped it in. “ _Accio_ sketchbook!”

Neal’s sketchbook flew across the room as he grabbed futilely after it. Elizabeth caught it and carried it back to the table. “When I said the mirror was an art piece, I wasn’t describing it entirely accurately. It’s actually been charmed, very skillfully, a long time ago. Anyone who looks in the mirror sees the thing they want most in the world.”

“You’re getting ahead of yourself,” Neal said. “Can we back up to the part where you said magic is real? How do people not know about this? What can you do with it? How do you decide who gets to be trusted with the secret?”

“This might take a while,” Peter said.

“I have chocolate cake,” Elizabeth said. She headed to the kitchen.

“To begin with,” Peter said, “only people who can use magic and their immediate family are allowed to know that it exists. It’s something only certain people can use. I can’t. I didn’t know a thing about it until I married El. Well, actually she told me a little bit about it a week before the wedding, but I try not to tell people that, because technically that was against the rules and she could get in a lot of trouble.”

* * *

Bill and Elizabeth took over question-answering after that, as the actual wizard and witch in the house. They kept talking through all of Elizabeth’s chocolate cake and most of a coffee cake that she provided afterwards. But finally, Bill ignored Neal’s question (about whether there was a spell to tell if something was counterfeit) to instead point out that an hour had passed, and they had made no progress on the mirror.

“It’s called the Mirror of Erised,” Elizabeth said. “I know we can’t replicate it perfectly, but we have to try. Is Bill’s picture of it enough for you to work off of?”

“Not unless absolutely necessary,” Neal said. “I don’t suppose there’s any way I could get a glimpse of the real one?”

“That might be possible,” Bill said. “El, is your house on the Floo network?”

“Of course,” Elizabeth said. She leaned back in her chair and picked up a jar from the mantelpiece behind her. “You can take your pick of the fireplaces.”

Bill scooted his chair to the side and started setting a fire in the dining room fireplace. “I think that just Neal and I should go,” he said. “We’ll come right back if there’s any trouble. Neal, this sort of transportation can only be controlled with magic, so you can’t go by yourself. Instead, just hold tight to my hand and do what I tell you.”

Neal followed Bill in crouching in front of the fireplace. Bill took a handful of powder from the jar and was about to drop it on the flames when Peter stopped him. “Have you considered that Neal’s tracking anklet is about to show that he’s in England when he’s supposed to be in New York? Can you put a spell on it or something?”

“I don’t know enough about tracking anklets to be able to charm them, but it shouldn’t be necessary,” Bill said. “It’s going to look like he teleported from here to Cornwall, and everybody knows teleportation doesn’t exist. They’ll chalk it up to an error with their technology.”

“They’ll still think it’s worth checking on.”

“Then tell them he’s here with you. We’ll be back before anybody would have time to come over and verify otherwise.” He tossed the powder into the fire, tugged Neal after him into the fireplace, and stated loudly “Shell Cottage.” Before Neal had time to do more than flinch at the sight of flames near his feet, they were stepping back out of the fireplace—and into a completely different house.

“Mozzie would have a field day with this,” Neal said. He looked around the house slowly.

The inhabitants of the house—a man, two women, and a host of small children—looked back at them. “You didn’t tell me you were bringing anyone back with you,” the elder of the two women exclaimed. “Wait, is this the Muggle forger?”

“That’s me,” Neal said. “Well, allegedly.”

“This is my wife, Fleur,” Bill introduced them. “This is my sister-in-law, Hermione, whose basement the mirror was found in, and this is my brother-in-law, Harry Potter. Neal’s just here to get a better look at the mirror before he makes our copy.”

Neal shook hands all around. They all seemed pretty friendly and normal. The only thing out of the ordinary was a faded zigzag scar on Harry’s forehead, and of course the sticks—well, wands, whatever—that they were all holding.

“We need to hurry,” Bill told them. “Neal can only be outside New York for a few minutes.”

“We’ll walk as we talk, then,” Harry said. “The mirror is in the pantry.” He led the way. “I’ve been looking into things quietly from my end,” he said. “Nobody’s talking about Ron and Hermione or paying any attention to them, so whatever the game is, it’s not a particularly fast one. Watch your step, we were in a hurry when we put the Extension Charm on the pantry so the entrance is a bit wonky. Nobody seems to have noticed that the mirror’s gone missing, either. It’s been moved between several different locations since—since the incident with Quirrell, and I don’t believe it was assigned to the care of any particular person at present, but still, I would have expected someone to have noticed by now.”

Neal wasn’t listening. He was staring into the mirror.

The mirror itself was beautiful, but he already knew that from Bill’s magical projection. What the projection hadn’t shown was what would be in the reflection. Harry and Bill were standing right behind Neal, and they should have been visible behind his shoulders, but they weren’t. Instead, Sara was there. She looked so real that Neal glanced over his shoulder, but she wasn’t there. In the reflection, Sara put her arm around his shoulders. He was holding something, some sort of bundle. Was it a child? He stepped forward to look closer…

“Don’t get lost in the mirror,” Harry said. “It doesn’t show what’s real, just what you wish could be.”

“And we need to hurry back,” Bill said. “Concentrate on what you need to copy it.”

* * *

Peter was on the phone when they got back. “No, he’s right here. I think I would know if my CI had attempted to leave the country. And if he had, you wouldn’t be doing a very good job if you didn’t tell me until he was all the way across the Atlantic, would you? Oh, it is, is it? Well, I’m glad that’s fixed then.” He gave Neal a thumbs up. “I hope this won’t happen again.”

Neal sat down at the table, where Bill’s projection of the mirror was still hanging in the air. “Can you make the projection bigger?” Neal asked, and flipped open his sketchbook.

The projection, it turned out, could be made even larger than the actual mirror; much better than working from photographs. But out of habit, Neal still started by sketching some of the most detailed ornamentation while it was still fresh in his mind from viewing the original. Then he made a list of what would need to be done in what order, and tasked the others with finding materials. “If we can’t find a mirror—the reflective glass part, I mean—in this size, we can get regular glass and silver it ourselves,” he said. “But that will take time, so if you know a place…”

“I’ll look at some of the charity shops around here,” Peter said. “They seem like they might have something like that. If I strike out, then I’ll go get the glass.”

“Sounds good,” Neal said. “Call me if you find something.” As Peter left, he turned to the others. “Do either of you magical people have a good source of gold for the frame?”

“Just make it out of whatever metal’s most convenient and we’ll transfigure it when it’s done,” Bill said. “It won’t hold permanently but it will hold long enough.”

“If you’re sure,” Neal said. “Aluminum would be cheapest. Do you know where you can get some?”

“I’ll figure it out,” Bill said, and left Neal to his sketching.

* * *

Even though Bill and Elizabeth were able to speed the project up with assorted magical assistance, the physical crafting of the mirror still took until late into the night. The clock was striking midnight when Neal finally stepped back and looked over the mirror as a whole. With the aluminum transformed into gold and the entire surface of the mirror placed under various antiquing spells, it was a very accurate replica except for one detail—it showed people’s normal reflections.

“Do either of you have a spell to fix the reflection?” he asked.

“That’s where the true magic of the mirror lies,” Elizabeth said. “As far as I’m aware, nobody knows all the charms that went into creating that mirror. Discerning a person’s true wishes and desires is a very difficult and complicated piece of magic, and then doing what the mirror does with them...I’m decent at charms, but that’s far beyond my abilities.”

Neal thought carefully. “The two mirrors will never be seen by the same person at the same time, correct?”

“I certainly hope not,” said Bill.

“So the viewer will have no way to verify that what the mirror is showing is actually the thing they desire most. They’ll already be inclined to believe that what they’re seeing must be what they desire, due to the surroundings. It’s simple social engineering. So all we have to do is randomly generate something that is likely to be greatly desired, and display it. We could use a computer, and run some sort of program...might need to replace the mirror with a projection screen, hide a camera in the frame somewhere to capture the viewer’s image…”

“If that’s all that’s needed, then I can do that,” Elizabeth said. “That’s much simpler than what I was picturing.” She picked up her wand, flourished it wildly, and aimed it at the fake mirror, whispering something under her breath. A golden flame splashed from the end of the wand and surrounded the mirror. Elizabeth stepped in front of it and took a look. “There, I think that works.”

Neal stepped forward as she stepped aside. He was alone this time—Elizabeth disappeared from view, but Sara did not appear. He was in an art gallery, surrounded by paintings. As he watched, one of the attendees walked up to shake his hand, then another. Was it his own art that was being shown? He wished his reflection weren’t standing in the middle of the room, so he could see the paintings better.

He shook his head to clear it. This wasn’t real either. But it was convincing. And that was what they needed. He turned to Elizabeth. “It works,” he said. “We did it.”

Bill slapped him on the back joyously. “Well done, both of you!” he said. “I couldn’t have done it without you.”

Peter didn’t look as happy as the others. “You know Neal can keep secrets, don’t you?” he said. “He won’t tell anybody.”

Bill shook his head. “We’re not allowed to make any exceptions.” He pointed his wand at Neal.

Neal stepped back in alarm. “Exceptions for what?”

Elizabeth was twisting her hands together. “No Muggles are allowed to know about magic unless they’re married to a witch or wizard. But Bill, nobody will know.”

“I really am sorry,” Bill said. “ _Obliviate._ ”

Neal blinked at the three others gathered in the Burkes’ dining room. “I’m sorry, am I interrupting something?” he asked. “I didn’t know your guest was still here.”

“It’s okay,” Elizabeth said. “But I think you’d better go home now. It’s late.”

Neal nodded. He picked up a blank sketchbook and set of pencils that he must have forgotten the last time he was over at their house, and headed out the door.

Once he’d gotten a cab to take him home, he called Mozzie. “Hey, I’m sorry for messing up our plans earlier, but I had a sudden headache so the forging didn’t work out. I hope you weren’t counting on me.”

“You underestimate the quality of my surveillance equipment, my friend,” Mozzie said.

“What?”

“I have a video you need to see, but first I need to make half a dozen copies of it and store them in diversified locations.”

“A video of what?”

“Of my surveillance this evening. The surveillance you asked me to do.”

Neal frowned. “I don’t remember asking you to do any surveillance.”

“Yes, I know. I’ll explain when you get to June’s.” Mozzie hung up, leaving Neal’s next question unanswered.

“How do you know?” Neal asked the empty air. “ _What_ do you know?” He rubbed his temples; that headache was coming back. Come to think of it, he didn’t remember how long he’d had it, or when it had gone away.


End file.
